Temporal and antecedent patterns in magazine and newspaper reading

One of the more interesting and less traveled areas of readership research has to do not with reach and frequency measures nor reader engagement but rather the temporal frameworks within which printed materials are read. The patterns and rhythms of everyday life color and guide the activities that individuals participate in. This principle extends to the activities of interest to this conference – magazine and newspaper readership. It would be unrealistic and terribly naïve to think that the temporal distribution of magazine and newspaper readership is a uniform one. Therefore it becomes interesting and useful to examine the empirical distribution of this form of print readership across the 24 hours that make up a single day. A second and coincidently less studied dimension of interest is the variety of antecedent events that precede magazine and newspaper readership activities. Temporal precedence is one of the key criteria for causality and while this paper makes no causal claims in any of its analyses, it is useful to know something about the type and probability of events that occur just temporally prior to magazine and newspaper readership. This paper will briefly describe some of the media consumption and life activity events that occur in a time period adjacent and prior to the time unit within which magazine or newspaper readership occurs.

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